Eye on A.I. · Monday, June 29, 2026
Philip Goff challenges the common assumption that Galileo's separation of consciousness from the physical world was solely for scientific expediency. Goff posits that this move was actually quite 'rebellious' against the prevailing Aristotelian and Church views, which attributed qualities like colors and sounds to the physical world itself, not just the soul. Galileo's division, by placing subjective qualities outside the purview of mathematical science, set the stage for the mind-body problem.
“And Galileo wasn't simply separating the qualia from the mathematics for scientific reasons. There was also a very dominant religious environment that that presumably he believed that at some level, uh, that there was a soul and that these things were, uh, features of the soul and not of the physical universe.”
“This division Galileo made of of putting consciousness just in the soul outside of what physical science can study, that was a very rebellious move actually. Um, I mean, it's got us used to it now, but it was quite radical at the time.”
“And he essentially split the world into two domains. The physical world, which he believed was amenable to mathematical description and a mental world, which he believed was not.”